Crosstalk meeting on October 14, 1997

Next Generation Internet: Architecture, Applications, Initiatives, and Implications

Participants:

William Mitchell, Dean School of Architecture and Chair, Council on Educational Technology
Jeff Schiller, MIT's Network Manager
Steve Lerman, Professor, Civil Engineering and Director CECI

Dean William Mitchell spoke about the visions that have come out of the Council on Educational Technology and that are contained in its report. The guiding principle is where MIT wants to go educationally, and the report contains a scenario-based approach. All scenarios need pervasive highspeed network, for example to integrate good audio and video with substantive material. It is proposed to put the implementation of the report on a "project" basis, requiring lots of industry partnership.

Jeff Schiller spoke about plans that are currently under development for bringing high bandwidth to MIT. The applications that are envisioned by the Council's Report need continuous high bandwidth if they are to handle streaming audio and video in real time. Random delay would make the medium unusable. He described MIT's participation in the vBNS (622 MB) project and also the RSVP protocol for ensuring Quality of Service (i.e. the ability to reserve bandwidth for certain applications). MIT, Harvard, and Boston University are working together on creating a Gigapop in the Boston area, which would connect these schools to the vBNS backbone and bring 100 MB into the Institute.

Prof. Steve Lerman talked about the NMIS (Networked Multimedia Information Services) project. The source is CNN Newsroom, a 30 minute broadcast which is downloaded daily from satellite, digitized, indexed, and made available to high schools.